sarah in nyc

 I have three tallitot all due the same week in June. Two are for a bride and a groom, Todd, and Alejandra. The other is for Ella a bat-mitzvah girl. Ella's tallit is made out of a herringbone woven silk noil that has a beautiful drape. Most of the tallit will be painted blue to look like the sky. The "stripe" sections of the tallit will look like the sky at sunset on one side and sunrise on the other. I had cut the silk to size and rough hemmed it. I was ready to start painting the blue sky. I didn't want the blue dye to bleed into the sunrise and the sunset. sections of the tallit. I came up with a clever way to block the dye. I first pressed in a fold  I then put raw rice on that fold. If any dye migrated the rice would hold back the flow of the dye. The watered-down dyes are applied in thin layers and allowed to dry and set between applications of color. So far two layers of dye have been applied. I have also begun constructing Todd's tallit. These strips need...

 My last post created a bit of a conversation. My friend Nancy was impressed with the  shrug  I had made and mentioned that she couldn't even thread a needle. I told Nancy that I could teach her how to thread a needle in a way that doesn't require the best vision. Ronna then asked that I give her a tutorial...so here it is. I learned this method of threading needles from a needlepoint book when I was a kid. As you can imagine, threading a needle with yarn is not the easiest task. Once I learned this method I no longer wet the end of a thread with saliva and hope for the best. My eyes are no longer what they were when I was eleven or twelve and this method has worked for me even when I am due for a new prescription on my eyeglasses.   Some of the photos in this tutorial were taken by me as I was threading needles ( Yes, it is tricky to be both threading needles and taking photos of the process.)and some were taken by my husband so some of the thread is black and ...

 When I have a chunk of work to do that requires a great deal of concentration and focus and has zero room for errors, it makes me a little bit anxious. That anxiety can lead to paralysis and procrastination. I have found a way to work around that paralysis. I call it priming the pump. I actually have had experience using a water pump (Thank you Curtis Betts). If you come across a water pump that hasn't been used in a while, the way to get it to work is to pour water down into the pump. The new water is somehow drawn into the workings of the pumps and then you are able to pump as much water as you need. I was about to start doing the lettering for Linda's tallit. It was difficult to source the fabric and it was expensive. The lettering for this piece just needs to look good.  In order to get ready to begin the lettering, I tackled a bunch of jobs that on the face of it looked like nothing but busy work. I had purchased the Ikea fabric for this tablecloth with my sister. It was...

 It isn't often that I can trace all of the threads of ideas going into a tallit but in the case of Linda's birthday tallit I can. At the moment, Linda's tallit exists only in my head. But I want to take you through how we have come up with our design for this tallit. This tallit is a birthday gift from Linda's husband.  The gift was announced with this certificate. I loved that it sort of mimicked the look of old Hebrew School certificates from the 1940s and 50s. Then came the work of figuring out what sort of tallit Linda wanted. Linda is a rabbi and has a wardrobe of tallitot. Linda wanted this tallit to be white. She also wanted it to be relatively lighter weight than some of her other tallitot.  The inspiration behind this tallit is the pandemic. One prayer that has been especially resonant for Linda during this era of Covid -19 when so many have died struggling to breathe is this one. אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא אַתָּה בְרָאתָהּ אַתָּה יְצַרְ...

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...